Well, well, well.
After making a ridiculous clown show of themselves, the Texas Democrats who fled rather than allow the majority legislature to redistrict the state, are returning.
From Tom Abrahams’ article for ABC News:
AUSTIN, Texas (KTRK) — ABC13 has confirmed with multiple sources that House Democrats will return to Texas.
Eyewitness News has not confirmed the date, but we do know that Democrats believe they’ve accomplished their mission by killing the first special session and by raising national awareness about the mid-decade redistricting effort.
It is unclear which day they will be in Austin at the Capitol, but they stress that they will push for Hill Country flooding relief to be the priority.
After our initial reporting online and on television, a spokesperson for the Texas Democratic Caucus sent the following statement to ABC News:
“Members are still assessing their strategies going forward and are in a private meeting to make decisions about future plans currently,” he wrote. “If and when Texas House Democrats breaking quorum decide to go home is squarely dependent on the actions the Governor, Speaker, and Texas Republicans in charge make with regard to prioritizing flood victims over redistricting that hurts Texans.”
As of 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 90 minutes after ABC13 first reported the move, nobody from the HDC had reached out directly to ABC13 to refute our initial reporting.
This comes as the House went another session without a quorum on Tuesday, with just 95 members present for the second day in a row. Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows said that assuming there is no quorum on Friday, the session will end, and a new one will begin.
Hours later, the Senate actually passed a new map that benefits Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. It’s the same map that passed out of committee in the House and precipitated more than 50 House Democrats to break quorum.
Democrats in the Senate walked out in protest, but a quorum remained. Sources told ABC13 that Senate Democrats will not break quorum.
My favorite part of this report? The claim that “Democrats believe they’ve accomplished their mission by killing the first special session and by raising national awareness about the mid-decade redistricting effort” .
Let’s start with the fact that killing the first special session accomplished absolutely nothing. No statewide votes have taken place since they left, and they will be back/redistricting will have been passed long before the next ones take place.
All they actually did accomplish was to hold up action to help flood victims – which would be occurring right now if they hadn’t run away from their legislative responsibilities.
As for raising national awareness of redistricting? The irony here is that all or almost all of these geniuses ran to three states – Illinois, Massachusetts and New York – that are among the most Democrat-friendly districted states in the country. So the comparisons of what they were protesting, to what their own party had done in the states they fled to, were so stark that even many of our mainstream media, however grudgingly, reported it.
In other words, the national awareness they raised was primarily that Republicans in Texas were doing nothing other than playing catch-up ball with Democrats, who had already done the same a long time ago. THIS is what they taught us.
Oh, and then there’s this little matter of the fines they will sustain and the possibility that legal action will be taken against them.
My congratulations to Texas’ Democrat legislators. You sure showed them, didn’t you.
